


he will tear your city down

by deadlybride



Series: fic for fire relief [4]
Category: Captive Prince - C. S. Pacat
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Light Dom/sub, M/M, Misunderstandings, Political Alliances, Post-Kings Rising, Sub Damen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:15:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26501995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deadlybride/pseuds/deadlybride
Summary: On the way to Laurent's coronation, a brief revolt makes Damen think Laurent is dead. Laurent reappears, and reassures.
Relationships: Damen/Laurent (Captive Prince)
Series: fic for fire relief [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1926739
Comments: 8
Kudos: 92





	he will tear your city down

**Author's Note:**

  * For [plainflour](https://archiveofourown.org/users/plainflour/gifts).



> This fic was written for wildfire relief. Personalized fics are available on request; see [this post on my tumblr](https://zmediaoutlet.tumblr.com/post/629171809812643840/fic-for-fire-relief) for more info.
> 
> Title from 'Soldier, Poet, King' by The Oh Hellos.

A month before Laurent’s official coronation, there is a brief but bloody revolt in Barbin, and Damen thinks for a brutal and world-greying hour that he’s lost him.

The Veretian contingent, with a full complement of an Akielon ambassadorial party, had sailed from Ios many weeks before. Ios was more-or-less stable; the kyroi had reassembled, under Damen’s kingship and Nikandros’ steady honesty, and the seeds had begun to be sown. A peace, made between two kings. An alliance, forged from trust and the love-story that couldn’t be kept quiet, considering how many had been witness to Laurent’s trial, and to how Damen had rather aggressively ignored sense to try to save him. To try to save them both. In meetings of their very small private council—Vannes and Laurent for Vere, Damen and Nikandros for Akielos—Nikandros had despaired. _No one,_ he said, _will trust now that it is a true alliance._ Gossip, he said, and stories that grew bigger with the telling. Like Laurent somehow besting forty men alone on a mountainside, except that now it was somewhat to do with how Damianos’s cock must be mighty enough to win over a frigid northern princeling.

Vannes had laughed, at that. Laurent had looked as cool and remote as a mountain peak. _Let them tell it_ , he’d said, while Damen had his face in his hands. _But let’s give them a few more details, to tell._

In every situation, Laurent found an advantage. There were whispers—from Pallas, from Lazar. To Akielons: the blond prince smiled for Damianos when he would not smile for another. To Veretians: the barbarian king protected Prince Laurent with his life, even with his own kingdom on the line. The long enmity between one country and another dissolved, in their two heads bent close together, in the gentle words they exchanged. To the smallfolk, and the servants, and the soldiers low in rank—was it not something to hope for? Love, they said it was. Love that could stop a war.

Not as easy to sell a love-match to the lords of Vere, to the kyroi of Akielos. That had to be done with diplomacy, with displays of advantage. _Look what we gain by having the barbarians on our side._ Most of Damen’s conversations became about trade routes. Wiser heads understood there was more to be gained from diplomacy than from war. A whisper, passed from servants to Vannes to Laurent, who lay half-dressed in Damen’s great bed at Ios and whose mouth curled, recounting it: _if wheat tariffs will go down as Damianos goes down, then all hail the ice-cock of the Prince of Vere_.

The Council of Vere had returned home after a chilling and deliberate series of meetings, in which they were closeted with Laurent and Laurent alone. Laurent said little of them, except that he had made his points clear. Damen kissed his jaw, when he said it, and didn’t ask. When Laurent left later with the Veretian ship Damen held him, on the harbor, in front of anyone who cared to look, and Laurent gave him that small unexpected smile and touched his cheek, and when the ship left his bright head was visible for a long time, glinting gold in the sunlight.

Damen’s ship followed, after a month. Time for each of them to rule, for a little while. To be seen as competent, apart. An official invitation was extended for the King of Akielos to attend the coronation of the King of Vere, and it was all the excuse he needed to get Laurent back in his arms. It was also a very public journey, with public stops publically planned, and they were—Damen can’t believe it—too confident.

In the spirit of that first allied campaign, they were to meet on neutral ground. Barbin, with its rolling hills, its farmland, the orchards heavy with apples. A festival in the Veretian style, to greet a visiting monarch, but away from the shadow of the looming castle at Arles. Damen moved more slowly, as king. His entourage was small, but he’d brought advisors, diplomats. Guards, and he never knew relief as he did when he remembered the decision to ride ahead with half of them, to get to the meeting grounds early. That they were there when the fighting started. If they’d been later—if they’d stopped—

The melee wasn’t brief. A planned attack, in three stages. Damen understands the details later, through a fog. What’s stuck in his mind, the detail that matters, is the way he’d seen Laurent’s pennant, the starburst on blue, stagger in the distance and then fall. He’d stood in his stirrups and shaded his eyes, and when he realized—when it was happening—

He’s told that he killed—many. Many. He stands in a tent, one of the brightly pennanted gaudy Veretian things that hadn’t been destroyed in the fighting. He’s attended by a low-ranked soldier who’d been a servant, he said, before he joined the army. He lets the boy remove his armor, carefully, and lets the boy wash the blood from his hands and arms and face, and he stands with his eyes pinned to the blue-silk wall and thinks of Laurent. Riders have spread throughout Barbin and the second there’s word he will be told. He knows this and can’t think past it. He’s waiting, to receive word, that after all their trials and the cruelties of the last year, that here in this godforsaken stretch of muddy farmland, the prince—his prince—

A noise, at the tent-flap. A muffled discussion. The boy-soldier disappears, reappears. “Exalted,” he says, softly, and Damen closes his eyes.

He can’t make the words come out of his mouth. The boy seems to understand—he’s clever, Damen thinks, the thought very distant as though it is all the way back in Ios, and when they finish here he will recommend that the boy be promoted—and there’s a pause, while Damen stands with his clean empty hands, half-stripped to his leather skirt, waiting to be told that Laurent is dead.

“Not how I wanted our reunion to go,” he hears.

His heart’s cracking, in his chest. He sways and there are cool fingers on his wrists, a strong grip, keeping him upright. Blue eyes, above a half-scarf of rough grey wool, and a wink of gold, on the hand matched with his.

“Steady,” Laurent says, his voice gentler, and Damen grabs him, crushes him close. His name is on Damen’s lips but he can’t say it. It’s—it was too close. The pennant falls, behind his eyes.

“I thought,” Damen says, finally, and Laurent says, “I know,” very softly. His fingers curl against Damen’s throat and Damen presses his lips to Laurent’s hair, the foolish disguise of the scarf pulled away. Damen says, “I can’t leave you again,” and Laurent’s slower, that time, to respond, and Damen pulls away to find Laurent’s eyes somber, and he says, “No,” but of course Laurent says, “Yes, you must.”

A plot, he explains. He’d seen shifts. A lord, loyal to the Regent. Whether because he believed the lies the Regent had told or had helped to sow them, Laurent doesn’t yet know. The love-stories and the wisdom of the alliance hadn’t swayed him and he’d thought to lop the head from Vere, to blame the visiting barbarian king. The timing of the attack was a surprise but the fact of it wasn’t, and he’d hoped they would have more time. Still, it could be fixed. But: “This time,” Laurent says, and Damen’s chest aches to hear how carefully he says it, “I really must go alone. I must. You’re too important now to scramble under the trees with me. If the King goes missing, at the same time that the Prince is dead—”

It’s logical. Damen hates it. “Take a guard,” he says, and Laurent shakes his head. “Please—please, for me. I can’t—”

“You can,” Laurent says, with a ruthless sort of compassion. “And you will trust me, and I will be back. Two hours. I swear it.”

It is a genuine, physical pain to end their embrace. Laurent’s hair is mussed from where Damen had gripped it, too tight. Longer, now—to his shoulders, nearly. He tucks it behind his ears, pulls the scarf again over his head. He’s in stolen clothes, somehow—grey woollens, like a farmhand. The jacket makes him shapeless. He lifts the scarf over his face, and then pauses, and lifts on his toes to grip Damen’s hair and pull him into a kiss—a kiss, their first kiss in more than a month, and it’s hard with Laurent’s teeth behind it but Damen clutches him, breathes him, before Laurent wrenches away and turns his face to the side, breathing out, the air shaking. “Two hours,” he says, after a moment, and tucks the scarf over his face again, tucking it back so the only way to recognize him are those remote, cold-sky eyes. Damen clenches his jaw, and lifts the tent flap for him. He watches Laurent disappear between the soldiers trying to organize themselves in the churned-mud battlefield that had been a parade ground, and then closes the flap, and settles to wait.

*

It rains. Damen listens to the patter on the tent, watches the brazier with its dark orange coals. He has left Meniados and Lycaeus to manage the camp. Everything is paused. The only order he gave was that no one was allowed to leave—no riders for distant forts, no word sent back to Arles. He lies on the pallet made for him in the tent and is alone, to think. To hope.

When he comes it isn’t through the flap. There’s a rustle, against the other side of the tent, and when Damen turns his head he sees a knife slice through the thick silk, a slice carving through just enough to admit a slim body. Damen sits up, heart in his throat. Laurent slips through and in an instant pins the flap of fabric back into the earth with his knife, and crouches there on the far side of the tent, just for a second, breathing hard.

“Is it done?” Damen says.

His voice sounds strange, thick. Laurent looks at him, sharply, and there’s a pause while he pulls the scarf from his head, his hair tumbling out pale and shining in the glow from the brazier. “Yes,” he says, simply, but he’s frowning.

Damen has one foot on the bare earth but can’t seem to stand. Laurent drops the scarf to the ground, slips off his wet shapeless jacket, and comes across the tent to him, and puts his fingertips to Damen’s jaw. His eyes searching, his brow furrowed. “Damen,” he says, and it’s soft, and Damen turns his face into Laurent’s palm, hiding himself. Behind his eyes the pennant falls and it isn’t enough, that Laurent’s here in front of him. These two hours—three, nearly, because Laurent is a liar—they haven't—he’s trying to drag up words, but he—

Laurent’s other hand touches his hair. “Quiet, now,” he says. Calm, but firm. That tone, when he’s giving orders and is confident they’ll be obeyed. Damen sits, quiet, and Laurent drags his fingers through Damen’s hair, gently untangling the curls. “Let me,” he says, and Damen nods, his eyes closing. He’d agree to anything, if Laurent’s hands stay on his skin. If he just stays and doesn’t leave, again.

Laurent unpins the chiton Damen had half put on as a ward against the Veretian chill. The cloth slips away, to lie with Laurent’s jacket. He unbuckles the leather skirt and Damen lifts his hips just enough that it can be dragged away, too. He’s left naked, other than his golden cuff, and Laurent urges him down to his back with soft touches, and when he’s flat on the pallet Laurent sits beside him, and leans over, and kisses him on the mouth, very gently.

Nothing like their kiss, before. He opens his mouth and Laurent licks inside, his hand on Damen’s jaw, but when Damen lifts a hand to touch Laurent’s hair it’s stopped, and pressed slowly but firmly back against the pallet. He’s left to lie there, to be kissed. Laurent kisses as he always has, with simple affection, and it’s making the heat rise behind Damen’s eyes, his chest slowly turning into a complicated, sore tangle.

A shift of weight, a slide. Laurent straddles Damen’s hips, still wearing his damp trousers. His thumbs drag over Damen’s cheekbones and Damen’s fingers curl against Laurent’s thighs, holding. He’s allowed that, at least. The warmth of Laurent, through the damp wool. The flex of the slim muscle, the confident seat of a rider, as he leans over, carefully shielding Damen from anything outside the heat he’s so-slowly stoking between them, here on their shared pallet.

The rain beats hard, above. He can still hear Laurent’s breath. A slow touch, over his shoulders, his chest. Massage, he realizes after a moment, his brain working at some lower speed. Laurent carefully working the muscle, gentle circles. His hands frame Damen’s ribcage, his thumbs smearing slow over Damen’s nipples, which were half-budded but tighten further at the touch. Not as sensitive as Laurent’s, not nearly, but he breathes out heat at the tent’s canopy when Laurent’s mouth touches one, liquid furl, and then the other. His abdomen, then. His hip. Laurent’s weight and touch shifts, easy, and when he moves away enough that Damen can no longer hold his thighs his hands curl empty on the pallet, waiting. He feels—drugged. His heart thuds slow and heavy in his ears as a drumbeat.

Laurent’s mouth, on his cock. His thighs are spread, easy confident hands on his knees. He drags in air and somehow it isn’t even a surprise, when always before Laurent had approached this act as a challenge. Damen had been honored by it, before. Now he melts, into the thin down pad, his mind swirling away. His cock had been half-roused, just by Laurent’s presence and the fact of his touch; he rises fully, now, and Laurent’s easy, meeting it. Not teasing, not the practiced skill of before. He licks into the slit at Damen’s cockhead and then sinks down immediately, sucking steadily, his head bobbing. Damen’s thighs flex and his hips lift, thoughtless reaction, and instead of pushing him back down Laurent allows it. Encourages it, one hand under Damen’s arse and the other holding his balls, rolling them soft and warm, the touch tender. Damen’s fingers curl against the mattress and his hips lift, and again, and Laurent makes the smallest sound, some chest-noise, and stays still while Damen fucks helplessly upward, fucking into the wet liquid heat of him, his mind drained away and all that’s left this simple physical pleasure, this knowing that Laurent is here with him, has worked him to this place, has opened himself so that Damen’s cock smears the back of his throat. Laurent doesn’t choke, doesn’t move, only holds Damen’s hips in the lightest grip and makes himself soft, and when Damen comes he doesn’t expect it. His balls clutch, his heart thudding. He grips the mattress and makes some sound, says something he hardly hears. Laurent’s mouth holds him, through it, suckling softly to prolong the pleasure, and prolongs it far enough that Damen’s cock hardly softens, just pulsing gently against Laurent’s tongue, in his throat. A minute—longer—Damen doesn’t know. Time is something outside of him. He drags in air and it feels cold, inside his overheated body. He pools empty, on the pallet.

When Laurent finally pulls his mouth away Damen’s heart has slowed, his blood quiet as a sprawling sluggish river. A kiss, to his hip, to the stretch of stomach under his navel. He feels the sensation of Laurent crawling upward, his body stretching out over Damen’s, and he expects to be kissed but instead Laurent lies on him, and draws his fingers through Damen’s hair, and tucks his face in close, by Damen’s ear. He’s talking, Damen realizes, after too long. Very quietly, but he’s talking.

“You did so well,” he’s saying, when Damen finally hears him. “You did just as I wanted. You’re perfect. I’m so glad of you.”

He’s speaking Akielon. His accent better, but still with that exotic lilt of Vere. Damen never wants him to smooth it away. “I,” Damen says, and feels Laurent’s attention sharpen, his body shifting. Damen licks his lips and yet no more words come.

Laurent lifts up, enough that they can see each other. His hair falls over one shoulder. In the low light from the fading brazier his eyes are very dark, enough that Damen can hardly see the blue. “You’re here,” Laurent says. Damen blinks at him. “Damianos. Here, with me. We’re safe. The danger has passed.”

Damen comes back to himself in stages. Laurent waits with him, patient. He lifts a hand, at last, and brushes his knuckles against Laurent’s fine ivory jaw. “I saw the pennant fall,” he says. His voice sounds as rough as if he hadn’t spoken in days. “I thought…”

Laurent doesn’t answer. His eyes are enough. He holds Damen’s neck, his throat, very gently. Damen could lie here for a week, just like this. With the fact of Laurent’s heart, beating in his chest. With the body-warm press of the gold they share against his skin.

The rain slackens, against the roof of the tent. The world turns. Damen licks his lips and tries to be a king, and not just a man whose world nearly ended. “What happened?” he says. There are dead to deal with. Orders to be given. He touches Laurent’s chin. “Can we—”

“Later.” Damen’s mouth shuts. Laurent’s mouth curls, just a little, at how quickly Damen obeys. He slips slightly to Damen’s side. Damen immediately misses his weight. “There's—half an hour, perhaps. We have time, for this.”

Damen turns his head and Laurent’s looking at him with a tenderness he can hardly bear. He knew that Laurent could hold his heart. He hadn’t known, until that moment when Laurent ordered him so gently to be quiet, that Laurent held his body, too. His mind. Every part of him, surrendered. It will be a joint kingdom, he thinks, but really, there will be only one ruler. It is calming, to think it. He bows his head, when Laurent touches his jaw, and lets his forehead settle against the soft rain-smell of Laurent’s hair, and sighs. Laurent says they have time. They have time.

**Author's Note:**

> [posted here on my tumblr if you'd like to reblog](https://zmediaoutlet.tumblr.com/post/629438830956707840/in-support-of-wildfire-relief-theactualpiemaker) \-- reblogs help more people see the relief campaign, so it's appreciated if you have a tumblr.
> 
> Would appreciate any thoughts you have.


End file.
